Overview

Kunié Sugiura: Discoveries
Sep 18, 2025–Dec 21, 2025

“This exhibition focuses on the relentless experimentation and scientific exploration, driven by artistic impulse, of Kunié Sugiura’s sixty-year engagement with photography. Born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1942, and one of the first students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to specialize in photography in the 1960s, Sugiura has worked for most of her life in the New York City studio where she has also lived since 1974. There, she has been creating experimental series that seem to pay little mind to the traditional trappings of and discourses around photography, and that stand apart from the trends that have variously defined the medium over the decades. Her oeuvre includes sculptural assemblages that combine photography and painting, large-scale photographic canvases, and a range of photograms of botanical, human, and animal subjects.

Even as she firmly established her career and life in the United States, Sugiura maintained close ties with Japan, and these deep connections to heritage reveal themselves in her works in both subtle and overt ways. Attuned to aspects of the natural world, from the fleeting beauty of flowers to the playful and humorous behavior of people and animals, to the patterns of geologic formations, her conceptual innovations in the deployment of photographic techniques led to discoveries and expressions of place, time, and self.”

— Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art